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4moreyears

01-10-2006, 10:58 PM

link (http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1147137,00.html)

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, engaged in a small but cheesy bit of deception last week. She released a letter, which quickly found its way to the front page of the New York Times, that she had written on Oct. 11, 2001, to then National Security Agency director General Michael V. Hayden. In it she expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with "specific presidential authorization." Hayden wrote her back that he was acting under the powers granted to his agency in a 1981 Executive Order. In fact, a 2002 investigation by the Joint Intelligence Committees concluded that the NSA was not doing as much as it could have been doing under the law—and that the entire U.S. intelligence community operated in a hypercautious defensive crouch. "Hayden was taking reasonable steps," a former committee member told me. "Our biggest concern was what more he could be doing."

The Bush Administration had similar concerns. In the days after 9/11, it asked Hayden to push the edge of existing technology and come up with the best possible program to track the terrorists. The result was the now infamous NSA data-mining operation, which began months later, in early 2002. Vast amounts of phone and computer communications by al-Qaeda suspects overseas, including some messages to people in the U.S., could now be scooped up and quickly analyzed.

The release of Pelosi's letter last week and the subsequent Times story ("Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show") left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn't exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."

A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are "fruit," and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality—spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders.

Henry Kissinger even wiretapped his own aides. But the "all fruit" assumption doesn't take into account the strict constraints placed on the intelligence community after the Nixon debacle, or the lethally elusive nature of the current terrorist threat. The liberal reaction is also an understandable consequence of the Bush Administration's tendency to play fast and loose on issues of war and peace—rushing to war after overhyping the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program, appearing to tolerate torture, keeping secret prisons in foreign countries and denying prisoners basic rights. At the very least, the Administration should have acted, with alacrity, to update the federal intelligence laws to include the powerful new technologies developed by the NSA.

But these concerns pale before the importance of the program. It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

Pelosi made clear to me that she considered Hayden, now Deputy Director of National Intelligence, an honorable man who would not overstep his bounds. "I trust him," she said. "I haven't accused him of anything. I was, and remain, concerned that he has the proper authority to do what he is doing." A legitimate concern, but the Democrats are on thin ice here. Some of the wilder donkeys talked about a possible Bush impeachment after the NSA program was revealed.

The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.

In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year.

But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country

FORD

01-10-2006, 11:16 PM

Fuck Joe Klein. He's obviously been drinking the Likud Kool Aid over at Dennis Miller's house with Ron Silver & ex Mayor Ed Krotch.

Nickdfresh

01-11-2006, 09:21 AM

Yeah right...

Too bad most Americans think that this Administration is eroding our civil liberties...

Here's another article by one of your heroes...

Jan. 10, 2006, 10:46PM
Gingrich warns GOP of tough elections
Scandals such as Abramoff's are more harmful to his party, he says

By POLLY ROSS HUGHES
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3579212.html) Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - The Republican Party, nervous in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal on Capitol Hill, could face a tough midterm election, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday.

"I think it hurts Republicans far more than it hurts Democrats to have these kinds of problems," Gingrich told reporters after a health care talk to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin think tank devoted to limited government.

"We have got to be the party of reform. We have got to clean up this mess. We have to take the Abramoff revelations very seriously," he said, adding Republicans must reclaim the role of reformers.

Gingrich gave up his own leadership role and left Congress during the Clinton years amid House ethics violations and poor Republican results in midterm elections.

Gingrich wished dethroned Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay of Sugar Land well as he fights felony money-laundering and conspiracy indictments in Texas. DeLay was forced to give up his leadership role last fall when he was indicted.

"I hope that Congressman DeLay is cleared as soon as possible. He's got to get through these trials in Texas, and I hope that happens as quickly as possible," he said.

"He's a very smart, very hard-working, very capable person. He's been historically very, very effective."

DeLay gave up his bid to regain his majority-leader position last week under pressure from Republicans concerned about his close political ties to Abramoff.

Gingrich said DeLay's decisions about his own future political effectiveness should not be based on the former house speaker's choice to give up his congressional seat.

"I think that's something he and his wife have to decide themselves," he said.

"I was a very entrepreneurial, very aggressive leader. I had focused very intently on ideas, big thinking," Gingrich said. "My thinking in November 1998 after we failed to pick up seats was that clearly I was not going to be effective with that scale of thinking."

polly.hughes@chron.com

Try reading actual news once in a while buddy, instead of the "Party Kool Aid Primer"©2006NDFProductions...

Cathedral

01-11-2006, 10:21 AM

The Patriot Act should be wadded up and used as toilet paper, that's all it's good for if you ask me.
Nothing in it will prevent another attack as long as we continue to have open borders.
The Patriot Act has taken more liberty away from us than it has taken away any ability for someone to attack us again, there is a fundamental problem in that equation when our own citizens lose freedom and liberty in the name of security, and it's false security at that.

Uncle Sam ain't gonna be there for you when shit hits tha fan, that is the job of the head of household and you need to be prepared.
If nothing else, Katrina showed me first hand what we can expect from the Feds when civil society takes a dive.

I support the death of that document because it is useless for us.
It's only advantage is to those who want to control us and take away our Constitutional Right's in this country.

If you are looking to the Government to keep you and your family safe, you have made a grave error in judgement and you need to read the 2nd Ammendment until you understand the concept and context it is written in.
The authors of the Constitution knew they couldn't protect everyone which is why we have the right to bear arms, so we can legally defend ourselves against any threat here at home.

The only peace lovers left standing will be those who know and understand that they will have to fight, even to the death, to preserve the peace they seek.
All others will be shot dead in the streets trying to reason with the unreasonable.

You had all better understand how fragile our economic system really is because it could collapse in an instant, then what?

I'm ready for almost anything, are YOU?
If not, then you better hope you can get ready before all hell breaks loose because you won't have any friends when all the safe guards have fallen by the way side and people cannot find water, and food to eat or feed their families with.

Remember, a brother shot and killed his sister over a bag of ice in New Orleans during Katrina.
Rational thought will be hard to come by under extreme circumstances and desperation.

Roth_Rage

01-11-2006, 02:35 PM

Originally posted by Cathedral
The Patriot Act should be wadded up and used as toilet paper, that's all it's good for if you ask me.
Nothing in it will prevent another attack as long as we continue to have open borders.
The Patriot Act has taken more liberty away from us than it has taken away any ability for someone to attack us again, there is a fundamental problem in that equation when our own citizens lose freedom and liberty in the name of security, and it's false security at that.

Uncle Sam ain't gonna be there for you when shit hits tha fan, that is the job of the head of household and you need to be prepared.
If nothing else, Katrina showed me first hand what we can expect from the Feds when civil society takes a dive.

I support the death of that document because it is useless for us.
It's only advantage is to those who want to control us and take away our Constitutional Right's in this country.

If you are looking to the Government to keep you and your family safe, you have made a grave error in judgement and you need to read the 2nd Ammendment until you understand the concept and context it is written in.
The authors of the Constitution knew they couldn't protect everyone which is why we have the right to bear arms, so we can legally defend ourselves against any threat here at home.

The only peace lovers left standing will be those who know and understand that they will have to fight, even to the death, to preserve the peace they seek.
All others will be shot dead in the streets trying to reason with the unreasonable.

You had all better understand how fragile our economic system really is because it could collapse in an instant, then what?

I'm ready for almost anything, are YOU?
If not, then you better hope you can get ready before all hell breaks loose because you won't have any friends when all the safe guards have fallen by the way side and people cannot find water, and food to eat or feed their families with.

Remember, a brother shot and killed his sister over a bag of ice in New Orleans during Katrina.
Rational thought will be hard to come by under extreme circumstances and desperation.

Well said. 5 stars.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c280/infodude/not_frightened.jpg

Cathedral

01-11-2006, 05:00 PM

The idea of Terrorism brings fear to the masses. For me it brings rage and anger and a will to fight in the tradition of those in my bloodline who gave their lives for this country in past wars and the many bloodlines that stood beside them in battle.

I hate war, but no peace on earth has ever come without it and it can't be maintained unless your army is strong.
Just the same though, an army that is too strong is a threat to its own society if the leadership isn't for, by and of the people.

Our tax dollars have paid for bunkers and shelters our elected officials will flock to like cowards, leaving the people to fend for themselves.
Hell, the Bush Administration couldn't even react to a Hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast, how in the hell would they react if war broke out in every major city due to terrorism?

The system we live under is far far more fragile than anyone cares to realize and the goal of our enemies is to attack that system to break us down to their level.

I have no problems blowing someone's head off if they are a threat to me or my family...and i won't hesitate to send them to God, right now.
Life is precious, and i've had a good one considering what i've had to endure and if i had to lay it down tomorrow, so be it.

I used to have hope for our future, I used to care what became of this country. But given how the leadership has failed the people over the last 60 years we are exactly where our illustrious government put us...In the path of certain destruction.

People can play politics all they want and bitch about the left or the right, but it won't matter who's side you're on pretty soon.
Greed has gotten the better of us and there is no turning back without burning the existing government to the ground and starting fresh.

But even then, a prosperous future is a long shot considering how we have been sold out economically by our leadership, especially in the last 20 years of so-called "Fair Trade" deals that aren't fair at all.

Warham

01-11-2006, 05:05 PM

I totally disagree about the Patriot Act, with all due respect Cathedral.

If it dies, we get that wall back that stopped the FBI and CIA from sharing their files with each other. That hurt us back in the 90's from putting two and two together.

FORD

01-11-2006, 05:58 PM

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:20 PM

We didn't stop the 9/11 attackers prior to 9/11 perhaps? If the feds did things so effectively in the 90s, then why did it happen in the first place? It took YEARS to plan that operation (not after Inauguration Day 2001 as some people would like to insist), and why didn't the FBI and CIA fully have a clue as to what was about to go down?

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:23 PM

FORD brings up a GREAT point I would LOVE to have Warham comment on.....

Please point to us the arrest, trial, and convictions of "terrorists" caught using the new found powers of the "patriot act"

Seems CLINTON was better at it than your Boy.

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:24 PM

Originally posted by Warham

why didn't the FBI and CIA fully have a clue as to what was about to go down?

Are you fucking kidding me??????????????????

THE FBI DID KNOW WHAT WAS GOING DOWN.

NO ONE IN YOUR WHITE HOUSE WANTED TO LISTEN:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

C'mon man, don't play dumb

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:26 PM

Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11
Heather Mac Donald
EMAIL
RESPOND
PRINT

The greatest obstacle to domestic security in the war on terror is the worldview of the liberal elites. No sooner had the Twin Towers fallen than the press and an army of advocacy groups were on the hunt for victims—not of Muslim fanaticism but of American bigotry. The liberal commentariat has denounced every commonsensical measure to protect the country the Bush administration has proposed as an eruption of racism or tyranny.

But the elite ideology began its corrosive work long before 9/11. For three decades, the liberal establishment, fixated on preventing a highly unlikely repeat of Watergate-era abuses, has encumbered America’s intelligence and national security capacities with increasingly crippling procedural inhibitions, culminating in domestic intelligence restrictions promulgated by the Clinton administration in 1995. As long as the elites continue to act as if America’s biggest enemy is not al-Qaida but the country’s own allegedly repressive and bigoted instincts, the nation’s defense against terror at home will proceed at half throttle.

In August 2001, mere weeks before the greatest mass murder of civilians in U.S. history, the Justice Department squelched two prescient efforts to avert the attacks. In Minneapolis, FBI agents frantically sought permission to search the possessions of one Zacarias Moussaoui, a bumbling, suspicious flight student and a colleague of Islamic fundamentalists. In New York, another FBI agent no less frantically sought clearance to throw his squad into an 11th-hour search for Khalid Almihdar, an al-Qaida operative at large in the country.

Justice Department bureaucrats refused both requests on absurd grounds. In the case of the New York agent, for example, they argued that because he was a criminal investigator, not an intelligence investigator, his participation in the manhunt for Almihdar could violate Almihdar’s rights: the al-Qaida agent was wanted not as an ordinary felon but as a terrorist.

The refusals may have had enormous consequences. Had the Minneapolis agents searched Moussaoui’s effects, they would have found leads to two of the 9/11 terrorists and to the Hamburg al-Qaida cell that planned the attack. Had the FBI been able to find Almihdar, it would have apprehended the pilot who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Instead, the plot hurtled on undisturbed to its gruesome climax.

The media have portrayed both episodes as “intelligence failures,” “communication failures,” or the failings of individual managers to “connect the dots.” They were not. Each of these lost opportunities was the foreseeable outcome of senseless terror-fighting restrictions put into place by Attorney General Janet Reno in 1995. Good luck finding any hint of the decisive role of the Clinton Justice Department in press accounts of the Moussaoui and Almihdar affairs, however.

The 1995 Reno guidelines, though the craziest development in intelligence law to date, are not unprecedented. They are the culmination of three decades of liberal grandstanding around intelligence-gathering and use.

For most of the twentieth century, Congress, courts, and legal scholars agreed that the president had plenary authority to investigate and disarm threats to the national security. If the FBI suspected a Russian attach&#eacute; in Washington of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, for example, the Bureau could tap his phone without needing permission from a judge. Judges were not competent to make national security decisions, as an unusually self-effacing court explained in 1980, because they lacked “mastery of diplomacy and military affairs.” The Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, legal opinion held, was intended to protect citizens against unreasonable government intrusion in domestic crime investigations, not where the survival of the nation itself was at stake.

In the 1970s, however, the courts and Congress changed their minds, signaling a new adversarial attitude toward executive power, born of 1960s anti-war protests and the Watergate revelations. Congressional hearings on a rash of excessively zealous FBI and CIA domestic investigations sent a clear message: the American government, not its enemies, was the real threat to the American people.

In response, Congress saddled the investigation of foreign threats with complex procedural and judicial restraints for the first time in history. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the president (acting through the FBI) would need a judicial warrant to surveil foreign spies and terrorists and their American collaborators on American soil. The new law defined who could be surveilled and under what circumstances, and it created two new Justice Department bodies to monitor that surveillance: the FISA court, composed of sitting federal judges, which issues surveillance warrants (needing renewal every 90 days); and the gatekeeper Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), which screens surveillance requests from FBI field offices and then argues them before the court.

Problems surfaced immediately. FBI agents complained that FISA created a Catch-22 situation: in order to meet the statutory requirements for obtaining a surveillance order, you needed to show that your target was a probable spy with anti-American designs—part of the information that the wiretap was intended to obtain. In 1982, a Senate Select Committee reported that FISA had “enmeshed intelligence in procedures wholly inappropriate to it.”

They hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet. Per the infallible rule of bureaucratic accumulation, FISA would trigger an explosion of obtuse procedural distinctions that would harm America’s ability to obtain, and act swiftly upon, intelligence information.

One of the most vexing consequences of FISA was the requirement, imposed over time by federal courts and Justice Department officials themselves, that FBI agents continuously evaluate what their “purpose” was in conducting foreign intelligence surveillance. As long as their purpose remained gathering information on suspected spies and terrorists for its own sake—to learn about the extent of a terror cell, say, or to use in covert operations like infiltration—the FISA wiretap could continue. But if the agents concluded that the suspects had committed a crime that the government should prosecute, they had to shut down the FISA wiretap, often prematurely.

In the late 1980s, for example, agents working for Oliver Revell, the FBI’s Associate Deputy Director of Investigations, were monitoring followers of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. A microphone installed in the home of a cell member in St. Louis recorded the parents’ murder of their daughter for becoming too Americanized. In order to prosecute the murder case, the Bureau had to close down the FISA surveillance, before agents had figured out the extent of the Abu Nidal cell.

Civil libertarian zealots sparked this nonsensical practice. They argued that because the probable-cause standards for a FISA wiretap were in some cases lower than the requirements for an ordinary criminal wiretap, power-mad prosecutors would gin up specious FISA requests in order to obtain criminal evidence in violation of constitutional standards. Therefore, they said, the Justice Department must draw a bright line between the gathering of foreign intelligence information for intelligence purposes, on the one hand, and for criminal investigation and prosecutorial purposes, on the other.

These arguments don’t withstand scrutiny. A FISA wiretap order is essentially a judicial warrant within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As Kenneth Bass III, the first director of the OIPR, argued recently before the Senate Judiciary Committee, if the FISA court has issued the surveillance order properly—to obtain information about the agents of a foreign power—the fruits of that order should be available for any national security use, including prosecution. Since acts of terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism are themselves crimes, the distinction between a “pure” foreign intelligence wiretap and a “criminal” wiretap, where terrorism is concerned, is nonsensical.

Moreover, contrary to civil libertarian hyperventilating, FISA’s probable-cause standards for surveilling U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens are almost indistinguishable from traditional criminal wiretap standards. To get a FISA order for a citizen or resident alien suspected of terrorism, the government must establish that he is an agent of a foreign power and is knowingly engaged in international terrorism or spying—in other words, committing a felony, just as for an ordinary criminal wiretap.

But absurdity is no bar to realization in the airless world of civil libertarian absolutism. To prevent the wholly fantastical abuse of FISA power by criminal investigators and prosecutors, a set of inhibitions gradually developed to regulate contacts among FBI agents who were gathering intelligence under a FISA order, FBI agents who may be investigating an already committed terrorist crime, and federal prosecutors.

Those inhibitions reached their peak destructiveness with Attorney General Reno’s “Procedures for Contacts Between the FBI and the Criminal Division Concerning Foreign Intelligence and Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations,” issued in July 1995. Immediately dubbed “the Wall,” the 1995 guidelines erected a mind-boggling and ultimately lethal set of impediments to cooperation among all relevant anti-terrorist personnel.

Let’s say—and this is a purely hypothetical example—that David Dell, an agent in the New York FBI office, has a FISA wiretap on Abdul Muhammad, an Islamic fundamentalist Yemeni affiliated with a suspected al-Qaida support cell in Brooklyn. Muhammad is not yet tied to any crime or criminal conspiracy; Dell is surveilling him to determine the extent of al-Qaida strength in New York. In a phone conversation with a fellow Yemeni in Pakistan, Muhammad mentions a dying swan and several Muslim names that Dell does not recognize. Several desks away in the FBI’s downtown office, Sam Simpson is investigating the al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. Simpson also worked on the al-Qaida bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, for which he traveled to Yemen and Kenya to execute warrants.

In a sane system, Dell and Simpson would be able to talk to each other about their cases, for although Dell doesn’t recognize the names and swan references in Abdul’s recent conversation, Simpson came across some of the named men while he was in Kenya and recognizes the code that Abdul is using. The content of the Abdul intercept would help Simpson’s criminal case, and Simpson’s knowledge of the code and identities of the men would help Dell map out the extent and possible goals of the Brooklyn cell. And if Dell interviews Muhammad, in a sane world Simpson would be in on the interview, since he might recognize the significance of some of Muhammad’s replies in a way that Dell could not, and he would then be able to press Muhammad immediately for further information. Simpson might even suggest to Dell that he expand his surveillance to a grocer in Brooklyn, suspected of running an informal credit scheme, or hawallah, that may have sent money to the USS Cole conspirators.

That reasonable (and, to repeat, entirely hypothetical) scenario is not the world of the Wall. Under the Wall, Dell and Simpson may not talk to each other, because Dell is receiving FISA information, and Simpson is working on a criminal case against terrorists. If Dell wants to pass any information to Simpson “over the Wall,” he first has to get permission from FBI headquarters in Washington, which then notifies the OIPR. If permission is granted, which is by no means certain, someone from the OIPR has either to come from Washington to New York or monitor all further communications between Dell and Simpson over the phone. This bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine radically chills communication, of course; but the deeper problem is that without Simpson’s expertise, Dell may not even recognize the significance of the information he is receiving, and so it may not even occur to him to request a Wall bypass. And as far as Simpson’s offering suggestions to Dell about other targets that would strengthen both their investigations, forget about it.

The insanities of the Wall don’t end here. Even if Dell and Simpson are working on the same case, they cannot review raw intelligence intercepts—recorded phone conversations among terrorists, for example—in their entirety, lest Simpson start suggesting better avenues of investigation. Instead, a high-ranking FBI official reviews the intercept and segregates the bits that are appropriate for each to see. But no third-party bureaucrat can possibly have the ground-level knowledge necessary to understand the potential significance to each investigator of the various bits. Nevertheless, in a climax of perverse logic, the more important the terror case, the more stringently policed is the segregation of intelligence intercepts.

Analogous to the Wall between FBI agents working in intelligence and those working on criminal cases was another wall, between the FBI and prosecutors, who also are barred from bringing their accumulated knowledge to bear on all intelligence information. According to Kenneth Bass, who helped draft FISA for the Carter administration, none of these Reno-mandated restrictions reflects the law’s original intent. “The Wall is absolutely ludicrous,” he says. “It is not in the national interest.”

No sooner had the ink dried on the Wall guidelines than America’s anti-terror operations suffered a nervous breakdown. Collaboration broke down almost completely. Says Mary Jo White, former New York U.S. attorney and the most seasoned al-Qaida prosecutor before 9/11: “The walls are the single greatest danger we have blocking our ability to obtain and act on [terrorist] information.”

Although the Wall only governs information-sharing, every other FISA-regulated procedure became entangled in red tape after the Reno edict. In 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism reported that the OIPR was imposing impossibly high and statutorily unjustified probable-cause standards. For example, to surveil someone who is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident alien, FISA requires showing that he is a member of a foreign terrorist organization. This is tough enough. But the OIPR started requiring evidence of a crime or specific knowledge of a group’s homicidal intentions before taking the request to the FISA court, and ignored the target’s past activities in determining probable cause. A worried Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported in 2000 that the OIPR was taking months scrutinizing FISA applications from the field, even though the nation’s safety depended on swift action against terrorist threats.

The practical effect? “We absolutely were unable to check people out,” reports James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office, in anger. “How can you have a proactive agency that protects citizens, if, in order to even start an investigation, you have to show that someone is a member of a known terrorist organization, with the wherewithal to carry out an attack and the intention to do so?”

Intelligence agents thought that things could not get much worse. They were wrong. In November 2000, the chief judge of the FISA court, Royce Lamberth, blasted the Bureau and one of its most respected agents for trivial violations of the Wall. The Reno Justice Department, it had turned out, was unable to abide by the Reno Wall. In September 2000, the Clinton administration had notified the FISA court that there had been over 75 breaches of the Wall since its inception. These included such violations as: disseminations of FISA intelligence to terrorist criminal squads in the FBI’s New York field office and to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York without court permission; a claim in a wiretap application that the target was not under criminal investigation for terrorism when in fact he was; and misstatements about the existence of a Wall in one particular FBI office between intelligence and criminal squads, when actually all the agents were on the same squad, and a supervisor overseeing both investigations screened the raw intelligence intercepts.

The reasonable response to such revelations is: Big deal. None of these Wall breaches violated anyone’s rights; they represent the most technical of infractions. But the FISA court went berserk at these supposed insults to its authority. It excoriated the FBI’s lead Hamas investigator, Michael Resnick, for innocuous omissions in his FISA requests and forbade him from ever appearing before it again. It ruled that from then on, every last communication between intelligence agents and law-enforcement officials required its approval.

In recoil, the FBI and Justice Department hunkered down completely. FBI headquarters and the OIPR, already a crippling drag on terrorist investigations, became paralyzing weights. Recalls Mary Jo White: “The walls went higher. Nothing could have been worse.” It was as if the Wall had become covered with concertina wire and broken glass, says Kallstrom. Morale plummeted. Agents in the New York bureau put signs on their desks saying: “You may not talk to me.”

Fast-forward to August 2001. Coleen Rowley and other FBI agents in her Minneapolis office were furiously banging their fists against the Wall. A Minneapolis agent had flagged Zacarias Moussaoui as a possible terrorist threat, after a local flight school disclosed that Moussaoui had been acting strangely and had paid cash (nearly $7,000) for simulator training. The Minneapolis office learned from the French Intelligence Service that Moussaoui, now in custody on an INS violation, had connections to radical Islamic groups. Desperate to search Moussaoui’s computer and possessions, the agents sought permission from FBI central headquarters to ask the OIPR to seek a warrant, as per Wall procedures.

They met only resistance. Finally, on August 28, 2001, the FBI’s National Security Law Unit (NSLU)—incredibly, yet another bureaucratic gatekeeper that stymies counterintelligence operations—pronounced that there was insufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s connection specifically to al-Qaida to justify a FISA search. FISA required no such showing: the French Intelligence Services’ linking of Moussaoui to Islamic radical groups in general was sufficient. The NSLU had imported a new, non-mandated roadblock into the act in the mania of risk-aversion that had gripped the agency after the Lamberth outburst. The investigation was over—until September 11, when FBI headquarters decided that maybe it ought to look into that computer after all.

Astoundingly, on August 29, 2001, the day after the National Security Law Unit killed the Moussaoui investigation that would have led to two 9/11 hijackers and to the Hamburg cell that planned the attack, it cited the Wall to rebuff as well a New York agent’s urgent pleas to let him and his subordinates help track down al-Qaida member Khalid Almihdar. According to the Bureau’s paranoid Wall interpretation, because the New York agent was working criminal cases against terrorists, and Almihdar had not been indicted for a crime, the agent and his men could not cooperate with the intell agents searching for Almihdar.

Immediately after the NSLU’s prohibition, the agent sent an angry e-mail to FBI headquarters: “Someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not . . . throwing every resource” at terrorists.

On September 11, when his office received the passenger manifests of the four hijacked flights, the agent shouted: “This is the same Almihdar we’ve been talking about for three months.” In a parody of bureaucratic buck-passing, his supervisor responded: “We did everything by the book.”

One cannot understand America’s failure to prevent 9/11 without understanding the history of the Wall. But rather than exposing the truth, America’s opinion elites have failed even to grasp it. In place of relentless investigation and tough-minded analysis, they have adopted a series of mutually contradictory attitudes about intelligence law determined by one goal only: discrediting the current Republican administration.

In May 2002, Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley released a memo she had written to FBI director Robert Mueller, complaining of the Wall and its role in blocking her office’s attempts to search Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer and possessions. Had a search request been granted, Rowley speculated, some part of the 9/11 plot might have been foiled.

The media and anti-law-enforcement lobby could not have leaped quicker to turn Rowley into a feminist heroine who had the guts to expose the Bush administration’s failures. “Courageous whistleblower” was the—quite accurate—epithet of choice. But against whom did Rowley blow her whistle? Columnist Maureen Dowd, the New York Times’s most knee-jerk feminist and reliable Republican baiter, didn’t need to do any hard reporting to know. Calling Rowley a “woman of ingenuity and integrity in [a] macho organization,” Dowd contrasts her to the lazy and dull-witted FBI men, who were too “inept, obstructionist, arrogant, antiquated, bloated and turf-conscious—and timid about racial profiling” (no, that last phrase is not a typo) to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

None of these newly minted aggressive law-enforcement types bothered to explicate the all-controlling role of the Clinton Wall in producing the Bureau’s ingrained risk-aversion. Too onerous, no doubt, to read through the mountains of reports necessary to uncover its existence and trace its tragic legacy. Instead, the suddenly gung ho press portrayed the Moussaoui struggle in an ahistorical vacuum, as the product of incomprehensible Republican foot-dragging on national security.

But look what happens next. In August 2002, the news breaks that Attorney General John Ashcroft has submitted a request to the FISA court to rescind the 1995 Wall guidelines. Having just lionized Rowley for her assault on the Wall, the media turn around and demonize Ashcroft for his assault on the Wall. This latest gyration—impelled by a mixture of ignorance and hypocrisy—proceeded as follows:

Last March, the Justice Department asked the FISA court to approve new FISA guidelines that would tear down the Wall, allowing full cooperation between criminal investigators, prosecutors, and intelligence agents in international terrorism cases. The department forcefully argued that such cooperation was mandated by the USA Patriot Act, which Congress passed in the wake of 9/11 to improve the nation’s intelligence capacity. That meant, if the department was right, that both the executive and the legislative branches demanded the rescinding of guidelines promulgated by Janet Reno’s edict.

In May, the FISA court starchily rejected the Justice Department’s proposed new guidelines. This result is not surprising: a leading Clinton administration architect of the Wall, Allen Kornblum, now advises the court on legal matters, and the new guidelines would strip the court of its fearsome power.

Ordinarily, all FISA proceedings are secret. The court broke with tradition, however, and grandiosely released its May 2002 opinion in August. The anti-Ashcroft media machine ramped into high gear. According to opinion makers, the country had just narrowly avoided becoming a police state, deterring at the last minute the megalomaniacal efforts of Attorney General Ashcroft to crush American freedom under his jackboots. Coleen Rowley was out of sight and out of mind. The media howled over the 75 Wall violations, criticized in the Court’s opinion, while only sporadically pointing out, and then only sotto voce, that those violations had all occurred on Clinton’s watch.

In a typical display of liberal self-righteousness, Jeffrey Rosen, legal-affairs editor of The New Republic and professor at George Washington Law School, warned in the Washington Post that the proposed new FISA guidelines would “resurrect the specter of domestic surveillance by the FBI that Congress specifically ruled out in the 1970s.” This is nonsense. FISA’s strict probable-cause standards for U.S. citizens and the act’s exacting procedural requirements for obtaining a surveillance order are, for better or worse, light years from the pre-FISA era, when the executive could conduct warrantless national security surveillance.

As in the Rowley affair, none of the reinvigorated defenders of American liberty bothered actually to explain the Wall and its fatal consequences. This silence guaranteed that the public could have absolutely no understanding of what was at stake in Ashcroft’s proposal, leaving the commentariat free to mischaracterize it at will. But criticizing the Wall revisions without disclosing the specific problems that those revisions aimed to correct is like criticizing America’s recent war on the Taliban without mentioning 9/11.

If 1960s-vintage paranoia about the imminent American police state created the intelligence paralysis leading up to 9/11, another key component of the elite worldview has dragged down every commonsensical effort to improve national security since the attacks. That is the belief that America stands ever ready to oppress people of color. Scarcely a homeland security proposal has emerged from the Bush administration that the opinion elites have not portrayed as an eruption of bigotry or tyranny.

After 9/11, the FBI investigated hundreds of thousands of terrorist tips and ultimately picked up a mere 1,200 men, mostly illegal immigrants, for questioning. The government detained some for weeks or sometimes months, checking out their backgrounds, before deporting or releasing them.

The vast majority of the men were Muslim. And any investigation of Islamic terror cells worth its salt will turn up . . . Muslims! But so charged and distorted has the debate about policing and race become over the last decade that it is now professional suicide to say that, in hunting Islamic terrorists, one is going to look for and find Muslims.

It is a misnomer to call such an inevitable practice “racial profiling,” as the term is commonly used. “Racial profiling,” as the elites imagine it, takes place when police play the odds about crimes that all groups commit, but at different rates. Looking for Muslims for participation in Muslim jihad is not playing the odds; it is following an ironclad tautology—Usama bin Ladin’s very definition of what it means to be a warrior for jihad. Nevertheless, anti-police and Arab advocates have co-opted the poisonous discourse about racial profiling to tar all rational law-enforcement efforts against Islamic terrorism as an outgrowth of blind prejudice.

Thus, the New York Times reported ominously that the post-9/11 detentions showed signs of “profiling.” According to this stupendous illogic, a non-biased investigation of Islamic terrorism would detain proportionate samples of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Hindus.

If the FBI and police have to defend themselves against charges of bigotry whenever they investigate or arrest Muslims on suspicion of Islamic terrorism, it’s going to be quite difficult, to say the least, to fight Islamic terrorism. But that is precisely what investigators are up against. When three of the 1,200 detainees were indicted in Detroit this August for operating a terrorist support cell that was infiltrating the Detroit International Airport, local Muslim leaders denounced the indictments as just another instance of racist stereotyping. “There is a feeling in our community of being a victim, which is a painful experience after September 11,” complained Mohamad Elahi, imam of the Dearborn Heights mosque.

Complaints of bias also greeted the arrest of members of another alleged terrorist cell in upstate New York, indicted this September. “This is a crime of terror by the FBI on the people of Lackawanna,” explained a protester outside the courthouse where the six men were being charged.

Cracking down on the crimes that make terrorism possible, above all identity fraud, also risks charges of discrimination. This August, the government charged 14 Detroit-area men, including six physicians, with providing phony documents to immigrants. “Is the government only targeting Arab-American doctors?” asked Imad Hamad of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “We truly wonder about the timing of it.” In the strange logic of these advocates, the defendants, arrested and indicted for serious crimes, were more sinned against than sinning.

This inflamed sense of grievance now leads Muslim spokesmen to equate minor inconveniences—such as being questioned at an airport—with major rights abuses. Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini, imam of the Irvine, California, chapter of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, exemplifies the disjuncture between the actual Muslim experience in America after 9/11 and the rhetoric used to describe it. A courteous, round-faced man, with a short dark beard and rimless glasses, who casually drops the names of Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, al-Qazwini has flown 20 times since September 2001, both domestically and abroad, and he has been searched only once. Yet of that one time, he asks heatedly: “Why did they turn me into an animal and deal with me in a disgraceful manner, just because my passport was Iraqi?” The “disgrace” consisted in being interrogated for half an hour about his mosque and whether the congregation was Sunni or Shia.

Al-Qazwini is not willing to cut security personnel any slack. “They should have common sense that not all Iraqis are terrorists,” he asserts. But in 95 percent of his flights, they assumed just that. To expect to fly search-free 100 percent of the time is ludicrous, given the enemy status of Iraq. Nor were the questions asked of him inappropriate, given the role of imams in breeding jihad.

If occasional interrogation before flying is now the equivalent of being “turned into an animal,” it’s hard to see how America can go forward with any rational security measures. But such hyperbole is now standard. A cartoon in Islamic Discourse magazine, a publication of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, shows two doors at an airline gate. The word “White” has been crossed out and “American” written in its stead on one; the word “Colored” has been replaced with “Arab-American” on the other. By no stretch of the imagination are post-9/11 security measures remotely close to Jim Crow laws, but Arab advocacy groups have masterfully usurped the mantle of black victimhood to put anti-terror efforts on the constant defensive.

It would be refreshing (if unprecedented in contemporary American culture) if Arab-Americans and other Muslims stepped outside their sense of grievance to grasp the larger interests of the country. But al-Qazwini, for one, continues to see the security issue only in personal terms: it’s okay if other people get searched for no reason at all, but he or his family shouldn’t be. He was happy that a blond woman was searched on his last flight. “I now know that the security agents are open-minded,” he says. But he is incensed that his own parents were searched before a flight to London. “This has nothing to do with security,” he fumes, “but it’s because some Mexican guy has been brainwashed by the media telling him: ‘When you find these people, search them, regardless of age or stature.’ Let’s have some standards!” Most Americans would agree.

One can’t blame al-Qazwini for his views. When our national leaders are unwilling even to name the enemy correctly, it’s no wonder that the advocates and the media have stepped into the breach with victimology. In speech after speech, President Bush refuses to identify our nemesis as “Islamic terrorism,” preferring instead the vaguer “terrorism,” a generality that won’t offend any religious or ethnic group.

Not giving offense now seems equal in importance to protecting the nation. Following the president’s lead, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, in his now-infamous 60 Minutes interview, said he would “hope” that a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida, and a young Muslim male from Jersey City would receive the same level of scrutiny when boarding an airplane. And, alas, they do.

Such security procedures have a strong symbolic purpose: to show that our hearts are pure and that we have never ever drawn any inferences from the fact that every anti-American terrorist since 1987—with the exception of Timothy McVeigh—has been Islamic.

President Bush could have put an end to such charades had he explained to the nation that, because Usama bin Ladin has called on all Muslims, not all Protestants or Jews, to kill Americans wherever they find them, we would have to give a little more scrutiny to people from certain parts of the world who seek to enter the country or assume high-security positions. These are minor inconveniences compared with the catastrophe that we are trying to avert, he could have said, and we ask for the patience and understanding of people subjected to greater inquiries about their purposes. Of course such measures do not imply that we think that all Middle Easterners, North Africans, or Muslims are terrorists, but until someone comes up with a method of identifying to a man each individual terrorist, a method that is neither over- nor under-inclusive, we will have to use cruder screening mechanisms.

In the absence of such a public explanation, the elites and the advocates continue to turn every reasonable security measure into another cause for grievance. Last fall, the Justice Department sought to interview about 5,000 young men from Middle Eastern and other terror-breeding countries who had entered the U.S. on short-term visas over the last two years, as had all the 9/11 hijackers. The interviews were voluntary, innocuous, and could be refused without consequence. Every civil liberties and Arab advocacy group rose up against the plan, portraying it, in the words of Islamic Discourse magazine, as “another wave of threats to our civil liberties.” The message: Every Muslim in America should feel offended. Why not an alternative message: This is not a problem. If you can help out the government in any way to prevent further attacks, please do so.

The fear of giving offense also hampers needed changes in immigration policy. American and foreign intelligence still cannot identify Islamic terrorists very well, or understand fully how they communicate with one another, activate sleeper cells, or channel funding for operations. If we were serious about preventing more terrorists coming to our soil, we would impose a moratorium on immigration and visitor visas from the countries most likely to export terrorism, until our intelligence services were capable of detecting our enemies. We would suspend the student-visa program until we had a foolproof system in place for tracking foreign students.

Instead, we have taken half-measures that do not provide any assurance of safety. But those half-measures have generated just as much outcry as real measures would have. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have bemoaned the fact that the State Department is taking longer than usual to process student visas from Middle Eastern and other terror-sponsoring countries. The resulting delays, warns the Times, are “generating widespread hostility” among Muslim men. Perhaps the Times has forgotten a far more lethal “hostility” among Muslim men that killed 3,000 people on 9/11.

The Justice Department has proposed putting the names of visa violators who have absconded following a deportation order into national criminal databases, so that if a police officer comes across an absconder in the course of a routine stop, he can arrest him. Yet even this baby step toward border enforcement—in a reasonable world, all visa violators, not just deportation evaders, would be listed—has produced the usual denunciations. National Public Radio even broadcast a comparison of the absconder program to the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

But what do you know—the opinion elites are just as hypocritically opportunistic when it comes to charges of profiling as they are regarding intelligence issues. Having worked themselves into a lather after 9/11 over the possibility that the Justice Department might use Middle Eastern or Muslim heritage as a factor in anti-terrorism investigations, they turned on a dime when doing so offered them a chance to beat up on the Bush Justice Department.

In May 2001, Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams wrote his supervisors that al-Qaida members might be training in U.S. flight schools. He had been observing several Islamists enrolled in an Arizona aviation academy, one of whom had told him that he considered the U.S. government and military legitimate targets of Islam. Another man who attracted Williams’s suspicion, it was later discovered, had associated with 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour and may have screened other al-Qaida pilots. In his memo, Agent Williams requested that the Bureau check out other Middle Eastern flight students for al-Qaida ties.

It is not hard to guess why the FBI ignored Williams’s request. Had word leaked out that the Bureau was investigating Muslim aviation trainees, the nation’s newspapers, networks, and advocates would have burst forth in one mighty roar of “Racism!” For the previous five years, the only law-enforcement topic that had consistently interested the press was the charge that the police were bigots.

So when the Williams memo surfaced in May 2002, the media, the victims’ lobby, and the legal professoriat berated Williams for his prejudices, right? Wrong: they lionized him for his prescience. Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU, the organization that has done more than any other to make “racial profiling” the equivalent of “genocide,” wins the prize for the most blatant hypocrisy. “It surprises me that the FBI was worried about racial profiling criticism,” she cooed on National Public Radio. “The Phoenix flight-school memo was good policing.” The ACLU should have fired her on the spot for betraying everything it has argued for the last five years.

The New York Times nearly equals Strossen in shameless self-contradiction. It editorialized that the FBI’s “fumbling” of the Arizona terrorist warning constituted an “egregious failure.” Never mind that before May 2001, and continuing to this day, the Times has been the nation’s most powerful voice berating the police for what it charged was their use of race and ethnicity in investigatory stops.

Such little moments of clarity, even if motivated by bad faith, have been rare since 9/11. The time is past for preening fantasies aimed at boosting the elites’ self-image as a bulwark against imagined American injustice. Yet the guardians of politically correct opinion have held on to their fondest fictions, despite their destructive effects on national security.

The power of the elites’ nonsensical ideology should never be underestimated. In the field of counterterrorism, the elites crippled intelligence-gathering not only by the legal restrictions that they sponsored. They accomplished something subtler but equally dangerous: they broke the agencies’ zeal to protect the country. The fuel for people who work in national security is not money but morale, observes James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office. “When you destroy that, people give up,” he says. “The notion that people who come to work every day to protect the country are raked over the coals because they shared terrorist information with criminal investigators is mind-boggling,” Kallstrom observes wearily. “We’ve been frozen in our tracks for decades by extremely vocal people who represent less than 0.01 percent of the country, but who have created totally risk-averse bureaucracies in the FBI, CIA, and the military.”

Here’s a modest proposal that would improve our domestic security by 100 percent: if the elite war on the war on terror continues, we should all just stop listening.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_why_the_fbi.html

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:27 PM

Originally posted by Cathedral

Hell, the Bush Administration couldn't even react to a Hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast, how in the hell would they react if war broke out in every major city due to terrorism?

.

Apparently the BushCO White House doesn't watch The Weather Channel

The whole world knew for 4 days what was coming.......

This country is NO BETTER prepared for an attack than it was 5 years ago.......and with an R white house, and an R congress no less....

Terror Level = Orange......better wear a sweater :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:29 PM

Originally posted by Warham
Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11
Heather Mac Donald
EMAIL
RESPOND
PRINT

The greatest obstacle to domestic security in the war on terror is the worldview of the liberal elites.

Why do you even fucking BOTHER with shit like this.

Think for yourself for once.:rolleyes:

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:31 PM

Read it. ;)

I hope you don't judge all articles off the first sentence. Terrible reading habit.

You should know better, if you've ever actually written lyrics in your life.

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:32 PM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
Apparently the BushCO White House doesn't watch The Weather Channel

The whole world knew for 4 days what was coming.......

This country is NO BETTER prepared for an attack than it was 5 years ago.......and with an R white house, and an R congress no less....

Terror Level = Orange......better wear a sweater :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Lounge, how many times have we been attacked in the last five years?

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:33 PM

Originally posted by Warham
Read it. ;)

I hope you don't judge all articles off the first sentence. Terrible reading habit.

You should know better, if you've ever actually written lyrics in your life.

I asked you a direct question, and you cut-n-paste right wing bullshit that begins with "liberal elite"

Obviously you couldn't muster up an answer yourself, you needed to rely on Google...

Terrible habit.

:rolleyes:

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:35 PM

Originally posted by Warham
Lounge, how many times have we been attacked in the last five years?

That's your barometer?

You JUST posted how attacks are YEARS in the planning.

So I guess you're just counting on nothing happening for the next 3 years?

Unfuckingbelievable.

I thought you were brighter than that.

My bad. :cool:

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:35 PM

You didn't post anything with a question mark at the end, so you DIDN'T ask me a question.

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:36 PM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
That's your barometer?

You JUST posted how attacks are YEARS in the planning.

So I guess you're just counting on nothing happening for the next 3 years?

Unfuckingbelievable.

I thought you were brighter than that.

My bad. :cool:

Yep, and who's to say that Bush's efforts haven't stopped attacks from happening these last five years?

Do you have some inside info you'd like to share?

And what if we aren't attacked over the next ten years. What will you say then?

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 06:37 PM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
FORD brings up a GREAT point I would LOVE to have Warham comment on.....

Please point to us the arrest, trial, and convictions of "terrorists" caught using the new found powers of the "patriot act"

Seems CLINTON was better at it than your Boy.

You responded to this, and you know it.

The cut-n-paste kid :rolleyes:

Whatever War.

I'm not in the mood to go round and round with you anymore.

Warham

01-11-2006, 06:38 PM

No, I was actually responding to FORD, not you.

Me cut and paste? You post more articles here than I do. It's laughable you'd ever say that about me. I post less articles than you, Nick, FORD, Brian or anybody else that posts here regularly.

Shame, shame.

blueturk

01-11-2006, 07:30 PM

What has Dubya done since 9/11?

The incredibly poorly planned war in Iraq, the Orwellian Patriot Act, color-coded "terrist" alerts (especially before the last election), leaking CIA agent's names, totally forgetting about the "hunt" for bin Laden...the list goes on and on. All of this leads to one conclusion. Bush is simply not qualified to be president. If not for 9/11 and the emotions surrounding it that the Bush administration have used so skillfully, Dubya would never have been re-elected.

Warham

01-11-2006, 07:36 PM

Do you have proof that Bush leaked Plame's name?

blueturk

01-11-2006, 08:07 PM

Originally posted by Warham
Do you have proof that Bush leaked Plame's name?

No, I don't. I shouldn't have included that one. A member of the Bush administration pulled that one, but probably not Bush himself. But since you're evidently conceding that the rest of the post is accurate, I don't feel too bad...

ODShowtime

01-11-2006, 08:35 PM

Originally posted by Warham
Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11
Heather Mac Donald

The greatest obstacle to domestic security in the war on terror is the worldview of the liberal elites.

For three decades, the liberal establishment, fixated on preventing a highly unlikely repeat of Watergate-era abuses,

What a bunch of fucking nonsense! "highly unlikely"?

My ass! How gullible can you be?

ODShowtime

01-11-2006, 08:38 PM

Originally posted by blueturk
What has Dubya done since 9/11?

If not for 9/11 and the emotions surrounding it that the Bush administration have used so skillfully, Dubya would never have been re-elected.

It took a lot more than that!

What has that worthless fucker done?

I'm really trying to think about any initiative he's ever started that made it to law except for drugs and indecency crackdowns.

oh yeah and WARS

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 08:46 PM

Well he fixed Social Security.....

Oh, no wait....

He um, implemented his energy plan he bragged about in 2000

Oh, no wait............

He brought back "honor and respect" to the White House

BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

He caught Bin Laden, dead or alive

Oh, no wait.............

He found the source of the Plame leak and "dealt with them"

Oh, no wait...............

He .......

fuck it.

He hasn't done shit.

Other than spy on us, waste a trillion dollars, sign every bill put in front of him, appoint cronies and flacks [Harriet Meiers anyone?]

ODShowtime

01-11-2006, 10:39 PM

Yep. Pretty much worthless.

4moreyears

01-11-2006, 11:05 PM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
Apparently the BushCO White House doesn't watch The Weather Channel

The whole world knew for 4 days what was coming.......

why did the local authorities get those people out of there then? Dont they have the weather channel in LA?

LoungeMachine

01-11-2006, 11:10 PM

Originally posted by 4moreyears
why did the local authorities get those people out of there then? Dont they have the weather channel in LA?

They were told FEMA was on it's way.

FEDERAL
EMERGENCY
MANAGEMENT
AGENCY

You understand what their job is, right?

Those that could leave, did.

Those that couldn't.....were abandoned by their own government

blueturk

01-12-2006, 02:17 AM

They weren't totally abandoned. Bush flew over in Air Force One and looked around....

FORD

01-12-2006, 03:33 AM

Originally posted by blueturk
They weren't totally abandoned. Bush flew over in Air Force One and looked around....

and said "Brownie, yur doin a heck of a job"

Nickdfresh

01-12-2006, 06:19 AM

Originally posted by Warham
No, I was actually responding to FORD, not you.

Me cut and paste? You post more articles here than I do. It's laughable you'd ever say that about me. I post less articles than you, Nick, FORD, Brian or anybody else that posts here regularly.

Shame, shame.

I at least post news articles that at least have the pretension of being unbiased.

Don't cuntpare the stuff I post to the lame, op-ed posed as news, partisan eliminate-the-facts-and-spin the-shit-out-of-it, stuff you guys post.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Warham

01-12-2006, 07:09 AM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
Well he fixed Social Security.....

Oh, no wait....

He um, implemented his energy plan he bragged about in 2000

Oh, no wait............

He brought back "honor and respect" to the White House

BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

He caught Bin Laden, dead or alive

Oh, no wait.............

He found the source of the Plame leak and "dealt with them"

Oh, no wait...............

He .......

fuck it.

He hasn't done shit.

Other than spy on us, waste a trillion dollars, sign every bill put in front of him, appoint cronies and flacks [Harriet Meiers anyone?]

Sounds like everything Clinton did.

Fixed Social Security? Nope

Implemented new energy plan? Nope

Implemented better health care system? Nope

Put good judges on the courts? Nope

Brought honor and respect to the White House? Nope

Stop Al Qaeda from attacking US? Nope

Of course he did do one thing that Bush hasn't done.

Impeached? Yep

:D

Warham

01-12-2006, 07:11 AM

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
I at least post news articles that at least have the pretension of being unbiased.

Don't cuntpare the stuff I post to the lame, op-ed posed as news, partisan eliminate-the-facts-and-spin the-shit-out-of-it, stuff you guys post.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Oh please.

Give me a fucking break.

Every time you post from the NY Times (the liberals favorite newspaper in the US besides the LA Times), you are posting op-ed material.

Warham

01-12-2006, 07:36 AM

The NY Times is so far to the left, they've referred to Hillary Clinton as a 'social conservative' a few times.

:rolleyes:

Nickdfresh

01-12-2006, 08:55 AM

Originally posted by Warham
Oh please.

Give me a fucking break.

Every time you post from the NY Times (the liberals favorite newspaper in the US besides the LA Times), you are posting op-ed material.

That's horseshit and you know it. You cannot even compare the overall reporting by the NY or LA Times to any of this op-ed horse shit. That's just completely delusional. In fact, NEWSHAX just basically takes a NY Times article and rewrites it, selectively editing out anything out so they can slant it completely. In fact the LA Times employs a conservative columnist I believe. Just because you don't like the news WARHAM, doesn't make it "liberal." And in fact many of those reporters also reported extensively on the CLINTON 'Monicagate' scandal...

Stop drinking the Goebbels Kool Aid already for fucks sake...:rolleyes:

Cathedral

01-12-2006, 09:28 AM

Originally posted by Warham
I totally disagree about the Patriot Act, with all due respect Cathedral.

If it dies, we get that wall back that stopped the FBI and CIA from sharing their files with each other. That hurt us back in the 90's from putting two and two together.

Hey, I got no problem making an ammendment that allowes sharing of info within our own system of justice, but I refuse to trade freedom and liberty for a false sense of security, which is my entire point.

And for the record, 9-11 happened because our government was arrogant and over confident with the idea that we were somehow untouchable because of the wide expanse of the ocean...guess we were all wrong on that one, so the political taking of sides here is a moot idea in my opinion.
Japan was able to stomp our ass into the ground on Dec. 7th 1941 because of a similar arrogance I was never gullible enough to believe given that bit of history.
I tell ya, Japans resources were far more limited in the 40's than the present and they pulled off a successful attack without the advantage of technology.

Warham, I fully understand your position but, the Patriot Act does more to supress our own citizens than anything else and i've read the thing a few times now trying to understand exactly what the benefits have been since it was put in place...It's done nothing that I see as being a positive and it hasn't led to any convictions as of yet.
Not to mention the number of "First Responders" that have yet to recieve any funding for the so-called "Improved Security Practices".

My point is that to make our government more efficient in it's sharing of vital information doesn't require ammendments that alter our Constitutional Right's.
There is so much bullshit thrown into the Act that it blatantly ignores having any arrogance at all and flies in the face of the lesson everyone should have learned from 9-11.

The Patriot Act is a sham that was designed to install a sense of security in the weak minded, albeit a false sense of security because there is no such thing as security unless you believe life actually has guarentees...but life has but only two definates. We were surely born and we'll surely die, beyond that, nobody could possibly protect you from the unknown, or even the known which seems to be the case about 9-11.

Dude, all Bush or any President had to do is make an executive order that allowes the sharing of intel between the CIA and the FBI, it didn't require a Patriot Act to get that done.
Anyone with a 1st grade education can see that the fluff in that act has serious consequences to our Constitutional Rights in the future and security is NOT what it was all about because it should already be understood that the government cannot protect everyone.

I gave our leaders the benefit of the doubt and took them at their word that the fluff would be removed before it became permanant, but much like everything else, i took this Administrations word for it and to date nothing has been fixed and they are trying to steam roll it by us yet again and i'm not buying it so fuck it, let it die.

4moreyears

01-12-2006, 11:06 AM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
They were told FEMA was on it's way.

FEDERAL
EMERGENCY
MANAGEMENT
AGENCY

You understand what their job is, right?

Those that could leave, did.

Those that couldn't.....were abandoned by their own government

More people expecting the federal gov't to bail them out. I guess the local officials Mayor/Governor are not responsible? Oh yea they were concerned about getting their own asses out of there.

4moreyears

01-12-2006, 11:07 AM

Originally posted by blueturk
They weren't totally abandoned. Bush flew over in Air Force One and looked around....

and if he never went down there you would bitch about that. Fucking Loser.

Nickdfresh

01-12-2006, 02:03 PM

Originally posted by 4moreyears
More people expecting the federal gov't to bail them out. I guess the local officials Mayor/Governor are not responsible? Oh yea they were concerned about getting their own asses out of there.

Yeah right idiot...

Uh, why are we "bailing out" IRAQ then fool?!?! Try being a little consistent with your logic. Baghdad get's billions siphoned off to corrupt officials and contractors, while Americans in New Orleans can just fucking drowned huh? Douche bag! Yeah, then why the fuck should we pay taxes and fund a military at the rate of billions more than all our potential foes combined? No wonder why we're the laughing stock of the world...

No wonder why you guys look like hypocritical two-faced clowns in the "liberal" media all time. You actually believe this shit....:rolleyes:

Warham

01-12-2006, 04:53 PM

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
That's horseshit and you know it. You cannot even compare the overall reporting by the NY or LA Times to any of this op-ed horse shit. That's just completely delusional. In fact, NEWSHAX just basically takes a NY Times article and rewrites it, selectively editing out anything out so they can slant it completely. In fact the LA Times employs a conservative columnist I believe. Just because you don't like the news WARHAM, doesn't make it "liberal." And in fact many of those reporters also reported extensively on the CLINTON 'Monicagate' scandal...

Stop drinking the Goebbels Kool Aid already for fucks sake...:rolleyes:

Wow, the LA Times has ONE conservative columnist? They are just trying to fill a quota obviously.

I usually don't post articles from Newsmax. I usually post them from a credible paper like the WSJ.

Why don't any of you libs here post articles from the WSJ? It's far more respected than that tabloid you like to cut and paste from.

blueturk

01-12-2006, 06:42 PM

Originally posted by 4moreyears
and if he never went down there you would bitch about that. Fucking Loser.

See if you can read this, Britney. I know there's a lot of words and stuff, but read as much as you can...

Katrina Timeline

Friday, August 26
GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA [Office of the Governor]

GULF COAST STATES REQUEST TROOP ASSISTANCE FROM PENTAGON: At a 9/1 press conference, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, commander, Joint Task Force Katrina, said that the Gulf States began the process of requesting additional forces on Friday, 8/26. [DOD]

Saturday, August 27
GOV. HALEY BARBOUR DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN MISSISSIPPI [Office of the Governor]

5AM CDT — KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 3 HURRICANE [CNN]

GOV. BLANCO ASKS BUSH TO DECLARE FEDERAL STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA: “I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster.” [Office of the Governor]

FEDERAL EMERGENCY DECLARED, DHS AND FEMA GIVEN FULL AUTHORITY TO RESPOND TO KATRINA: “Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.” [White House]

Sunday, August 28
2AM CDT – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

7AM CDT – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 5 HURRICANE [CNN]

MORNING — LOUISIANA NEWSPAPER SIGNALS LEVEES MAY GIVE: “Forecasters Fear Levees Won’t Hold Katrina”: “Forecasters feared Sunday afternoon that storm driven waters will lap over the New Orleans levees when monster Hurricane Katrina pushes past the Crescent City tomorrow.” [Lafayette Daily Advertiser]

9:30 AM CDT — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES FIRST EVER MANDATORY EVACUATION OF NEW ORLEANS: “We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” said Nagin. “This is going to be an unprecedented event.” [Times-Picayune]

AFTERNOON — BUSH, BROWN, CHERTOFF WARNED OF LEVEE FAILURE BY NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR: Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center: “‘We were briefing them way before landfall. … It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped.’” [Times-Picayune; St. Petersburg Times]

4PM CDT – NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ISSUES SPECIAL HURRICANE WARNING: In the event of a category 4 or 5 hit, “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer. … At least one-half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed. … Power outages will last for weeks. … Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.” [National Weather Service]

LATE PM – REPORTS OF WATER TOPPLING OVER LEVEE: “Waves crashed atop the exercise path on the Lake Pontchartrain levee in Kenner early Monday as Katrina churned closer.” [Times-Picayune]

APPROXIMATELY 30,000 EVACUEES GATHER AT SUPERDOME WITH ROUGHLY 36 HOURS WORTH OF FOOD [Times-Picayune]

LOUISIANA NATIONAL GUARD REQUESTS 700 BUSES FROM FEMA FOR EVACUATIONS: FEMA sends only 100 buses. [Boston Globe]

Monday, August 29
7AM CDT – KATRINA MAKES LANDFALL AS A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

8AM CDT – MAYOR NAGIN REPORTS THAT WATER IS FLOWING OVER LEVEE: “I’ve gotten reports this morning that there is already water coming over some of the levee systems. In the lower ninth ward, we’ve had one of our pumping stations to stop operating, so we will have significant flooding, it is just a matter of how much.” [NBC’s “Today Show”]

MORNING — BUSH CALLS SECRETARY CHERTOFF TO DISCUSS IMMIGRATION: “I spoke to Mike Chertoff today — he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue [immigration], so we got us an airplane on — a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are.” [White House]

MORNING – BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House]

11AM CDT — MICHAEL BROWN FINALLY REQUESTS THAT DHS DISPATCH 1,000 EMPLOYEES TO REGION, GIVES THEM TWO DAYS TO ARRIVE: “Brown’s memo to Chertoff described Katrina as ‘this near catastrophic event’ but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, ‘Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities.’” [AP]

LATE MORNING – LEVEE BREACHED: “A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new ‘hurricane proof’ Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north.” [Times-Picayune]

11AM CDT — BUSH VISITS ARIZONA RESORT TO PROMOTE MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT: “This new bill I signed says, if you’re a senior and you like the way things are today, you’re in good shape, don’t change. But, by the way, there’s a lot of different options for you. And we’re here to talk about what that means to our seniors.” [White House]

4:30PM CDT — BUSH TRAVELS TO CALIFORNIA SENIOR CENTER TO DISCUSS MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT: “We’ve got some folks up here who are concerned about their Social Security or Medicare. Joan Geist is with us. … I could tell — she was looking at me when I first walked in the room to meet her, she was wondering whether or not old George W. is going to take away her Social Security check.” [White House]

8PM CDT — RUMSFELD ATTENDS SAN DIEGO PADRES BASEBALL GAME: Rumsfeld “joined Padres President John Moores in the owner’s box…at Petco Park.” [Editor & Publisher]

8PM CDT – GOV. BLANCO AGAIN REQUESTS ASSISTANCE FROM BUSH: “Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.” [Newsweek]

LATE PM – BUSH GOES TO BED WITHOUT ACTING ON BLANCO’S REQUESTS [Newsweek]

Tuesday, August 30
11AM CDT – BUSH SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT NAVAL BASE CORONADO [White House]

MIDDAY – CHERTOFF FINALLY BECOMES AWARE THAT LEVEE HAS FAILED: “It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.” [Meet the Press, 9/4/05]

PENTAGON CLAIMS THERE ARE ENOUGH NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS IN REGION: “Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs.” [WWL-TV]

MASS LOOTING REPORTED, SECURITY SHORTAGE CITED: “The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked,” Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said. “We’re using exhausted, scarce police to control looting when they should be used for search and rescue while we still have people on rooftops.” [AP]

U.S.S. BATAAN SITS OFF SHORE, VIRTUALLY UNUSED: “The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore. The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents. But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty.” [Chicago Tribune]

2PM CDT – PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS [AP]

BUSH RETURNS TO CRAWFORD FOR FINAL NIGHT OF VACATION [AP]

Wednesday, August 31
1:45AM CDT – FEMA REQUESTS AMBULANCES THAT DO NOT EXIST: “Almost 18 hours later, [FEMA] canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, ‘the DOT doesn’t do ambulances.’” [Wall Street Journal]

NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS ARRIVE IN LOUSIANA, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, AND FLORIDA: Troops arrive two days after they are requested. [Boston Globe]

TENS OF THOUSANDS TRAPPED IN SUPERDOME; CONDITIONS DETERIORATE: “A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. ‘We pee on the floor. We are like animals,’ said Taffany Smith, 25, as she cradled her 3-week-old son, Terry. … By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror. … At least two people, including a child, have been raped. At least three people have died, including one man who jumped 50 feet to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for. There is no sanitation. The stench is overwhelming.”" [Los Angeles Times, 9/1/05]

PRESIDENT BUSH FINALLY ORGANIZES TASK FORCE TO COORDINATE FEDERAL RESPONSE: Bush says on Tuesday he will “fly to Washington to begin work…with a task force that will coordinate the work of 14 federal agencies involved in the relief effort.” [New York Times, 8/31/05]

JEFFERSON PARISH EMERGENCY DIRECTOR SAYS FOOD AND WATER SUPPLY GONE: “Director Walter Maestri: FEMA and national agencies not delivering the help nearly as fast as it is needed.” [WWL-TV]

80,000 BELIEVED STRANDED IN NEW ORLEANS: Former Mayor Sidney Barthelemy “estimated 80,000 were trapped in the flooded city and urged President Bush to send more troops.” [Reuters]

3,000 STRANDED AT CONVENTION CENTER WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER: “With 3,000 or more evacuees stranded at the convention center — and with no apparent contingency plan or authority to deal with them — collecting a body was no one’s priority. … Some had been at the convention center since Tuesday morning but had received no food, water or instructions.” [Times-Picayune]

PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY DECLARED FOR ENTIRE GULF COAST: “After a natural disaster, short and long-term medical problems can occur. Diseases like cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and mosquito-borne illnesses tend to break out under these conditions.” [WCBS-TV]

CHERTOFF “EXTREMELY PLEASED WITH THE RESPONSE” OF THE GOVERNMENT: “We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy.” [Department of Homeland Security]

EARLY AM – BLANCO AGAIN TRIES TO REQUEST HELP FROM BUSH: “She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president’s Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, “I just asked him for help, ‘whatever you have’.” She asked for 40,000 troops.” [Newsweek]

4PM CDT — BUSH GIVES FIRST MAJOR ADDRESS ON KATRINA: “Nothing about the president’s demeanor… — which seemed casual to the point of carelessness — suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.” [New York Times]

7PM CDT – CONDOLEEZZA RICE TAKES IN A BROADWAY SHOW: “On Wednesday night, Secretary Rice was booed by some audience members at ‘Spamalot!, the Monty Python musical at the Shubert, when the lights went up after the performance.” [New York Post, 9/2/05]

8PM CDT — FEMA DIRECTOR BROWN CLAIMS SURPRISE OVER SIZE OF STORM: “I must say, this storm is much much bigger than anyone expected.” [CNN]

Thursday, September 1
7AM CDT — BUSH CLAIMS NO ONE EXPECTED LEVEES TO BREAK: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” [Washington Post]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE VISITS U.S. OPEN: “Rice, [in New York] on three days’ vacation to shop and see the U.S. Open, hitting some balls with retired champ Monica Seles at the Indoor Tennis Club at Grand Central.” [New York Post]

STILL NO COMMAND AND CONTROL ESTABLISHED: Terry Ebbert, New Orleans Homeland Security Director: “This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.” [Fox News]

2PM CDT — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES “DESPERATE SOS” TO FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: “This is a desperate SOS. Right now we are out of resources at the convention centre and don’t anticipate enough buses. We need buses. Currently the convention centre is unsanitary and unsafe and we’re running out of supplies.” [Guardian, 9/2/05]

2PM CDT — MICHAEL BROWN CLAIMS NOT TO HAVE HEARD OF REPORTS OF VIOLENCE: “I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.” [CNN]

NEW ORLEANS “DESCEND[S] INTO ANARCHY”: “Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. ‘This is a desperate SOS,’ the mayor said.” [AP]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE GOES SHOE SHOPPING: “Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, ‘How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!’” [Gawker]

MICHAEL BROWN FINALLY LEARNS OF EVACUEES IN CONVENTION CENTER: “We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.” [CNN]

Friday, September 2
ROVE-LED CAMPAIGN TO BLAME LOCAL OFFICIALS BEGINS: “Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan…to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.” President Bush’s comments from the Rose Garden Friday morning formed “the start of this campaign.” [New York Times, 9/5/05]

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES DEMAND THAT DHS TO PAY ATTENTION TO WORKER-SAFETY: “By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.” [Wall Street Journal]

EARLY AM — BUSH WATCHES DVD OF THE WEEK’S NEWSCASTS CREATED BY STAFF WHO THOUGHT BUSH “NEEDED TO SEE THE HORRIFIC REPORTS”: “The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.” [Newsweek]

10 AM CDT — PRESIDENT BUSH STAGES PHOTO-OP “BRIEFING”: Coast Guard helicopters and crew diverted to act as backdrop for President Bush’s photo-op.

10:35AM CDT — BUSH PRAISES MICHAEL BROWN: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” [White House, 9/2/05]

BUSH VISIT GROUNDS FOOD AID: “Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.” [Times-Picayune]

LEVEE REPAIR WORK ORCHESTRATED FOR PRESIDENT’S VISIT: Sen. Mary Landrieu, 9/3: “Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.” [Sen. Mary Landrieu]

BUSH USES 50 FIREFIGHTERS AS PROPS IN DISASTER AREA PHOTO-OP: A group of 1,000 firefighters convened in Atlanta to volunteer with the Katrina relief efforts. Of those, “a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.” [Salt Lake Tribune; Reuters]

12PM CDT — BUSH “SATISFIED WITH THE RESPONSE”: “I am satisfied with the response. I am not satisfied with all the results.” [AP]

PM – FEMA’S NO. 2 OFFICIAL “IMPRESSED” WITH GOVERNMENT RESPONSE: “I am actually very impressed with the mobilization of man and machine to help our friends in this unfortunate area….I think it’s one of the most impressive search-and-rescue operations this country has ever conducted domestically.” [Time]

Saturday, September 3
SENIOR BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL LIES TO WASHINGTON POST, CLAIMS GOV. BLANCO NEVER DECLARED STATE OF EMERGENCY: The Post reported in their Sunday edition “As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.” They were forced to issue a correction hours later. [Washington Post, 9/4/05]

9AM CDT — BUSH BLAMES STATE AND LOCAL OFFICIALS: “[T]he magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need.” [White House, 9/3/05]

8:05PM CDT – FEMA FINALIZES BUS REQUEST: “FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,335 buses at 8:05 p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving the first day.” [Wall Street Journal]

http://www.thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline

4moreyears

01-12-2006, 10:04 PM

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Yeah right idiot...

Uh, why are we "bailing out" IRAQ then fool?!?! Try being a little consistent with your logic. Baghdad get's billions siphoned off to corrupt officials and contractors, while Americans in New Orleans can just fucking drowned huh? Douche bag! Yeah, then why the fuck should we pay taxes and fund a military at the rate of billions more than all our potential foes combined? No wonder why we're the laughing stock of the world...

No wonder why you guys look like hypocritical two-faced clowns in the "liberal" media all time. You actually believe this shit....:rolleyes:

Nobody told them to stay. I am not talking about helpless people in hospitals, but the dumb assholes who filled the superdome. Get the fuck out of there. Why did the local and state govt do nothing to help, and you continue to ignore it. Continue to blame the person who i would least expect to help me. Your local govt is already in your area, they should already be ready to help. Instead you dumb asses just look to bash Bush when the first failure was local. The fact that local govt were the first to fall on their asses has nothing to do with anything in Iraq.

4moreyears

01-12-2006, 10:06 PM

Originally posted by blueturk
See if you can read this, Britney. I know there's a lot of words and stuff, but read as much as you can...

Katrina Timeline

Friday, August 26
GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA [Office of the Governor]

GULF COAST STATES REQUEST TROOP ASSISTANCE FROM PENTAGON: At a 9/1 press conference, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, commander, Joint Task Force Katrina, said that the Gulf States began the process of requesting additional forces on Friday, 8/26. [DOD]

Saturday, August 27
GOV. HALEY BARBOUR DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN MISSISSIPPI [Office of the Governor]

5AM CDT — KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 3 HURRICANE [CNN]

GOV. BLANCO ASKS BUSH TO DECLARE FEDERAL STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA: “I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster.” [Office of the Governor]

FEDERAL EMERGENCY DECLARED, DHS AND FEMA GIVEN FULL AUTHORITY TO RESPOND TO KATRINA: “Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.” [White House]

Sunday, August 28
2AM CDT – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

7AM CDT – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 5 HURRICANE [CNN]

MORNING — LOUISIANA NEWSPAPER SIGNALS LEVEES MAY GIVE: “Forecasters Fear Levees Won’t Hold Katrina”: “Forecasters feared Sunday afternoon that storm driven waters will lap over the New Orleans levees when monster Hurricane Katrina pushes past the Crescent City tomorrow.” [Lafayette Daily Advertiser]

9:30 AM CDT — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES FIRST EVER MANDATORY EVACUATION OF NEW ORLEANS: “We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” said Nagin. “This is going to be an unprecedented event.” [Times-Picayune]

AFTERNOON — BUSH, BROWN, CHERTOFF WARNED OF LEVEE FAILURE BY NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR: Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center: “‘We were briefing them way before landfall. … It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped.’” [Times-Picayune; St. Petersburg Times]

4PM CDT – NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ISSUES SPECIAL HURRICANE WARNING: In the event of a category 4 or 5 hit, “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer. … At least one-half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed. … Power outages will last for weeks. … Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.” [National Weather Service]

LATE PM – REPORTS OF WATER TOPPLING OVER LEVEE: “Waves crashed atop the exercise path on the Lake Pontchartrain levee in Kenner early Monday as Katrina churned closer.” [Times-Picayune]

APPROXIMATELY 30,000 EVACUEES GATHER AT SUPERDOME WITH ROUGHLY 36 HOURS WORTH OF FOOD [Times-Picayune]

LOUISIANA NATIONAL GUARD REQUESTS 700 BUSES FROM FEMA FOR EVACUATIONS: FEMA sends only 100 buses. [Boston Globe]

Monday, August 29
7AM CDT – KATRINA MAKES LANDFALL AS A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

8AM CDT – MAYOR NAGIN REPORTS THAT WATER IS FLOWING OVER LEVEE: “I’ve gotten reports this morning that there is already water coming over some of the levee systems. In the lower ninth ward, we’ve had one of our pumping stations to stop operating, so we will have significant flooding, it is just a matter of how much.” [NBC’s “Today Show”]

MORNING — BUSH CALLS SECRETARY CHERTOFF TO DISCUSS IMMIGRATION: “I spoke to Mike Chertoff today — he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue [immigration], so we got us an airplane on — a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are.” [White House]

MORNING – BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House]

11AM CDT — MICHAEL BROWN FINALLY REQUESTS THAT DHS DISPATCH 1,000 EMPLOYEES TO REGION, GIVES THEM TWO DAYS TO ARRIVE: “Brown’s memo to Chertoff described Katrina as ‘this near catastrophic event’ but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, ‘Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities.’” [AP]

LATE MORNING – LEVEE BREACHED: “A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new ‘hurricane proof’ Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north.” [Times-Picayune]

11AM CDT — BUSH VISITS ARIZONA RESORT TO PROMOTE MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT: “This new bill I signed says, if you’re a senior and you like the way things are today, you’re in good shape, don’t change. But, by the way, there’s a lot of different options for you. And we’re here to talk about what that means to our seniors.” [White House]

4:30PM CDT — BUSH TRAVELS TO CALIFORNIA SENIOR CENTER TO DISCUSS MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT: “We’ve got some folks up here who are concerned about their Social Security or Medicare. Joan Geist is with us. … I could tell — she was looking at me when I first walked in the room to meet her, she was wondering whether or not old George W. is going to take away her Social Security check.” [White House]

8PM CDT — RUMSFELD ATTENDS SAN DIEGO PADRES BASEBALL GAME: Rumsfeld “joined Padres President John Moores in the owner’s box…at Petco Park.” [Editor & Publisher]

8PM CDT – GOV. BLANCO AGAIN REQUESTS ASSISTANCE FROM BUSH: “Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.” [Newsweek]

LATE PM – BUSH GOES TO BED WITHOUT ACTING ON BLANCO’S REQUESTS [Newsweek]

Tuesday, August 30
11AM CDT – BUSH SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT NAVAL BASE CORONADO [White House]

MIDDAY – CHERTOFF FINALLY BECOMES AWARE THAT LEVEE HAS FAILED: “It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.” [Meet the Press, 9/4/05]

PENTAGON CLAIMS THERE ARE ENOUGH NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS IN REGION: “Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs.” [WWL-TV]

MASS LOOTING REPORTED, SECURITY SHORTAGE CITED: “The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked,” Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said. “We’re using exhausted, scarce police to control looting when they should be used for search and rescue while we still have people on rooftops.” [AP]

U.S.S. BATAAN SITS OFF SHORE, VIRTUALLY UNUSED: “The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore. The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents. But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty.” [Chicago Tribune]

2PM CDT – PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS [AP]

BUSH RETURNS TO CRAWFORD FOR FINAL NIGHT OF VACATION [AP]

Wednesday, August 31
1:45AM CDT – FEMA REQUESTS AMBULANCES THAT DO NOT EXIST: “Almost 18 hours later, [FEMA] canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, ‘the DOT doesn’t do ambulances.’” [Wall Street Journal]

NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS ARRIVE IN LOUSIANA, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, AND FLORIDA: Troops arrive two days after they are requested. [Boston Globe]

TENS OF THOUSANDS TRAPPED IN SUPERDOME; CONDITIONS DETERIORATE: “A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. ‘We pee on the floor. We are like animals,’ said Taffany Smith, 25, as she cradled her 3-week-old son, Terry. … By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror. … At least two people, including a child, have been raped. At least three people have died, including one man who jumped 50 feet to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for. There is no sanitation. The stench is overwhelming.”" [Los Angeles Times, 9/1/05]

PRESIDENT BUSH FINALLY ORGANIZES TASK FORCE TO COORDINATE FEDERAL RESPONSE: Bush says on Tuesday he will “fly to Washington to begin work…with a task force that will coordinate the work of 14 federal agencies involved in the relief effort.” [New York Times, 8/31/05]

JEFFERSON PARISH EMERGENCY DIRECTOR SAYS FOOD AND WATER SUPPLY GONE: “Director Walter Maestri: FEMA and national agencies not delivering the help nearly as fast as it is needed.” [WWL-TV]

80,000 BELIEVED STRANDED IN NEW ORLEANS: Former Mayor Sidney Barthelemy “estimated 80,000 were trapped in the flooded city and urged President Bush to send more troops.” [Reuters]

3,000 STRANDED AT CONVENTION CENTER WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER: “With 3,000 or more evacuees stranded at the convention center — and with no apparent contingency plan or authority to deal with them — collecting a body was no one’s priority. … Some had been at the convention center since Tuesday morning but had received no food, water or instructions.” [Times-Picayune]

PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY DECLARED FOR ENTIRE GULF COAST: “After a natural disaster, short and long-term medical problems can occur. Diseases like cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and mosquito-borne illnesses tend to break out under these conditions.” [WCBS-TV]

CHERTOFF “EXTREMELY PLEASED WITH THE RESPONSE” OF THE GOVERNMENT: “We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy.” [Department of Homeland Security]

EARLY AM – BLANCO AGAIN TRIES TO REQUEST HELP FROM BUSH: “She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president’s Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, “I just asked him for help, ‘whatever you have’.” She asked for 40,000 troops.” [Newsweek]

4PM CDT — BUSH GIVES FIRST MAJOR ADDRESS ON KATRINA: “Nothing about the president’s demeanor… — which seemed casual to the point of carelessness — suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.” [New York Times]

7PM CDT – CONDOLEEZZA RICE TAKES IN A BROADWAY SHOW: “On Wednesday night, Secretary Rice was booed by some audience members at ‘Spamalot!, the Monty Python musical at the Shubert, when the lights went up after the performance.” [New York Post, 9/2/05]

8PM CDT — FEMA DIRECTOR BROWN CLAIMS SURPRISE OVER SIZE OF STORM: “I must say, this storm is much much bigger than anyone expected.” [CNN]

Thursday, September 1
7AM CDT — BUSH CLAIMS NO ONE EXPECTED LEVEES TO BREAK: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” [Washington Post]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE VISITS U.S. OPEN: “Rice, [in New York] on three days’ vacation to shop and see the U.S. Open, hitting some balls with retired champ Monica Seles at the Indoor Tennis Club at Grand Central.” [New York Post]

STILL NO COMMAND AND CONTROL ESTABLISHED: Terry Ebbert, New Orleans Homeland Security Director: “This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.” [Fox News]

2PM CDT — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES “DESPERATE SOS” TO FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: “This is a desperate SOS. Right now we are out of resources at the convention centre and don’t anticipate enough buses. We need buses. Currently the convention centre is unsanitary and unsafe and we’re running out of supplies.” [Guardian, 9/2/05]

2PM CDT — MICHAEL BROWN CLAIMS NOT TO HAVE HEARD OF REPORTS OF VIOLENCE: “I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.” [CNN]

NEW ORLEANS “DESCEND[S] INTO ANARCHY”: “Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. ‘This is a desperate SOS,’ the mayor said.” [AP]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE GOES SHOE SHOPPING: “Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, ‘How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!’” [Gawker]

MICHAEL BROWN FINALLY LEARNS OF EVACUEES IN CONVENTION CENTER: “We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.” [CNN]

Friday, September 2
ROVE-LED CAMPAIGN TO BLAME LOCAL OFFICIALS BEGINS: “Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan…to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.” President Bush’s comments from the Rose Garden Friday morning formed “the start of this campaign.” [New York Times, 9/5/05]

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES DEMAND THAT DHS TO PAY ATTENTION TO WORKER-SAFETY: “By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.” [Wall Street Journal]

EARLY AM — BUSH WATCHES DVD OF THE WEEK’S NEWSCASTS CREATED BY STAFF WHO THOUGHT BUSH “NEEDED TO SEE THE HORRIFIC REPORTS”: “The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.” [Newsweek]

10 AM CDT — PRESIDENT BUSH STAGES PHOTO-OP “BRIEFING”: Coast Guard helicopters and crew diverted to act as backdrop for President Bush’s photo-op.

10:35AM CDT — BUSH PRAISES MICHAEL BROWN: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” [White House, 9/2/05]

BUSH VISIT GROUNDS FOOD AID: “Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.” [Times-Picayune]

LEVEE REPAIR WORK ORCHESTRATED FOR PRESIDENT’S VISIT: Sen. Mary Landrieu, 9/3: “Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.” [Sen. Mary Landrieu]

BUSH USES 50 FIREFIGHTERS AS PROPS IN DISASTER AREA PHOTO-OP: A group of 1,000 firefighters convened in Atlanta to volunteer with the Katrina relief efforts. Of those, “a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.” [Salt Lake Tribune; Reuters]

12PM CDT — BUSH “SATISFIED WITH THE RESPONSE”: “I am satisfied with the response. I am not satisfied with all the results.” [AP]

PM – FEMA’S NO. 2 OFFICIAL “IMPRESSED” WITH GOVERNMENT RESPONSE: “I am actually very impressed with the mobilization of man and machine to help our friends in this unfortunate area….I think it’s one of the most impressive search-and-rescue operations this country has ever conducted domestically.” [Time]

Saturday, September 3
SENIOR BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL LIES TO WASHINGTON POST, CLAIMS GOV. BLANCO NEVER DECLARED STATE OF EMERGENCY: The Post reported in their Sunday edition “As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.” They were forced to issue a correction hours later. [Washington Post, 9/4/05]

9AM CDT — BUSH BLAMES STATE AND LOCAL OFFICIALS: “[T]he magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need.” [White House, 9/3/05]

8:05PM CDT – FEMA FINALIZES BUS REQUEST: “FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,335 buses at 8:05 p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving the first day.” [Wall Street Journal]

http://www.thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline

Who wrote this Howard Dean or Sean Penn? Great source!!!

Nickdfresh

01-12-2006, 10:17 PM

Originally posted by 4moreyears
Nobody told them to stay. I am not talking about helpless people in hospitals, but the dumb assholes who filled the superdome.

How where they supposed to get out? Walk? It was an emergency shelter of last resort. The fact that virtually every one survived th4e hurricaine there shows that it worked. Fucking FEMA and the military took how long to reach them?

Get the fuck out of there.

How? Did you see the evacuation of Houston? Fucking gridlock and fuel shortages with shades of MAD MAX in the background...

Why did the local and state govt do nothing to help, and you continue to ignore it.

I didn't ignore anything...Could they have done a better job? Yes! But FEMA dropped the ball like it was an two-ton boulder...

Continue to blame the person who i would least expect to help me.

Um, why should you least expect your Federal gov't to help you in, oh say, A FUCKING CAT5 HURRICANE!!??

Your local govt is already in your area, they should already be ready to help.

Oh JESUS, the local gov't was flooded and overwhelmed in a cataclysmic, apocalyptic end game. I mean, if your city is wiped off the map in a matter of hours, sure, the local gov't should handle it every time.

Instead you dumb asses just look to bash Bush when the first failure was local.

The vast majority of the failures were at the Federal level. And for fuck sake, ISN'T FEMA PART OF The HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT????!!! WHAT HAPPENS IN A TERRORIST ATTACK? Should NYC have handled 9/11 all "on their own?"

The fact that local govt were the first to fall on their asses has nothing to do with anything in Iraq.

No, I guess all the resources we expend over there and the fact that the same idiot that fucked up that conflict is also giving incompetent cronies important jobs in the agency designed to react to a plague/a major terror attack/natural disasters...:rolleyes:

Warham

01-12-2006, 10:21 PM

But we can all admit that New Orleans did a piss poor job of disaster preparation.

Nickdfresh

01-12-2006, 10:41 PM

Originally posted by Warham
But we can all admit that New Orleans did a piss poor job of disaster preparation.

Yeah, well, so did FEMA. And the New Orlean's municipality isn't going to respond if my town gets hit...